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PNAC member of the week: Dick Cheney |
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2-01-04 |
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Cheney went to Washington in 1969 to serve as
special assistant to (fellow PNAC member)
Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic Opportunity in the
Nixon administration. |
| Since he and Bush arrived at the White House,
Cheney has managed to accomplish quite a bit. He's met with the heads of
oil, gas, and nuclear power companies, assembled their "wish
lists," and turned them into a new national Energy Plan. Cheney's
close relations with folks like Ken Lay of Enron have made this one of the
most corporation-friendly administrations in history. |
| Mr. Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks
of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in
taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas
Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Mr. Cheney joined the
company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans." (1) |
| Cheney in numbers:
Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635
Increase in government contracts while Cheney led
Halliburton: 91%
Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that
occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars)
Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of
Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7
Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give
congressional investigators: 13,500
Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney
presidential campaign: $1,800,000 |
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In a debate with Vice Presidential candidate Joe
Lieberman in 2000, Lieberman noted that Cheney had done well for himself
as CEO of Halliburton. Cheney responded flatly, "I can tell you, Joe,
the government had absolutely nothing to do with it." But even a
glance at Cheney's tenure at Halliburton suggests otherwise. |
| During his five years as CEO,
Cheney nearly doubled the size of Halliburton's government contracts,
totaling a whopping $2.3 billion. He convinced the Export-Import Bank of
the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil companies another $1.5 billion,
backed by U.S. taxpayers. As exposed in the article below, some of these
loans went to a Russian company with ties to drug dealing and organized
crime. (2) |
| Cheney's rule at Halliburton was
characterized by a ruthless geopolitical strategy that put aside political
beliefs whenever they were inconvenient. In a number of cases, Halliburton
and its subsidiaries supported or even ordered human rights violations and
broke international laws. Consider the following examples: |
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Libyan dictator and suspected anti-U.S.
terrorist Moammar Gadhafi engaged a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton
company Brown & Root to perform millions of dollars worth of work.
According to the Baltimore Sun, Brown & Root was fined $3.8 million
for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although Cheney wasn't leading
Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries' sales to Libya
continued throughout his tenure.) |
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Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the
Financial Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and
affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq,
selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's
regime. (3) |
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In Burma, Halliburton joined oil companies in working on two notorious gas
pipelines, the Yadana and Yetagun. According to an Earth Rights report,
"From 1992 until the present, thousands of villagers in Burma were
forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure,
lost their homes due to forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and
killed by soldiers hired by the companies as security guards for the
pipelines. One of Halliburton’s projects was undertaken during Dick
Cheney’s tenure as CEO." (The full report is linked to below.) |
| Halliburton is now being
investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for Enron-style
accounting practices that took place while Cheney was CEO. |
| In late August 2001, a Los
Angeles Times article exposed the connections between Cheney's Task Force
and Bush's campaign contributors. The article described how the final
report adopted verbatim a global warming policy suggested by the U.S.
Energy Association (an energy industry group), how language was altered to
favor Halliburton, and how a company called Peabody Coal and its
affiliates gave more than $900,000 to the Bush campaign and "gained
extraordinary access" to the Task Force. (4) |
| While the mainstream media
mostly continue to cast Bush as the captain of his ship, hints that Cheney
is the dominant figure shaping Washington's diplomatic policy have become
too numerous to ignore. A recent Washington Post article revealed a most
stunning example of this lopsided state of affairs. According to the Post,
Bush had ordered Cabinet officials not to give any preferential treatment
to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) when U.S. forces moved
into Iraq last spring. But soon after, in flagrant violation of his
directive, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into
southern Iraq in early April, "with the approval of the vice
president." That
was the crowd you saw cheering in the statue toppling photo-op. |
| It was Cheney's choices that
prevailed in the appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet
national-security officials, beginning with that of (PNAC
member) Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. Not only did Cheney
personally intervene to ensure that Powell's best friend, (PNAC member)
Richard Armitage, was denied the deputy defense secretary position, but he
also secured the post for his own prot?g?, (PNACmember) Paul Wolfowitz.
Moreover, it was Cheney who insisted that the ultra-unilateralist (PNAC
co-founder) John Bolton be placed in a top State Department arms job – a
position from which Bolton has consistently pursued policies that run
counter to Powell's own views. |
| Cheney's chief of staff and
national security adviser, (PNAC member)I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, a Washington lawyer and Wolfowitz prot?g?, is considered a far more
skilled and experienced bureaucratic and political operator than Rice.
With several of his political allies on Rice's own staff – , including
deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Middle East director (PNAC
member) Elliott Abrams – Libby "is able to run circles around
Condi," noted a former NSC official . |
| According to retired
intelligence officers, Cheney and Libby played the decisive role in
distorting the intelligence used to make Bush's case for war. Libby made
frequent trips to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the run-up to
the Iraq war, pressuring analysts in include questionable evidence
supplied by the INC and Rumsfeld-led hawks. |
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More recently, it was Cheney who led the effort to deny
Powell the authority to negotiate a new UN Security Council resolution
that would have reduced the Pentagon's control over the political
transition in Iraq, even though the president initially approved such a
deal.
For an extensive briefing on Halliburton and Cheney's
foreign policy impact, check out this well-written and thorough report (5)
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| Cheney made $36 million at
Halliburton in 2000 alone. Thesmokinggun.com has his tax returns to prove
it (6) |
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More:
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| Related reading:
To
fully understand Cheney's role in the administraion's war profiteering
scheme, all we have to do is follow the money and connect the dots. |
| Dick
Cheney's Real Record |
